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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

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Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#421

Post by tempestn »

This passage is terrible and beautiful:

Here’s a story from my father. He was teaching a course for working professionals that had a large project component. He—being naive and idealistic—decided that as long as the students eventually finished the project, they had learned the material, so they should get full credit. Thus, his policy was that students could submit the project, get it graded, and then repeat this process as many times as they wanted. He knew this would mean extra work for him, but thought it would be worth it for the students.

The result, of course, was catastrophe.

To call the strategy many students took “abuse” gives no measure of their ingenuity. They realized that they could skip learning the material, and instead complete the project by running an evolutionary algorithm with my father’s grading as a reward function.

Edit: I will say though, I would give this grading scheme a poor grade too. The teacher recognizes it's more work for them, but doesn't seem to recognize it's also far more work for the students. Particularly those who care about their grades and are actually trying to abide by the spirit of the thing and not game the system.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#422

Post by avs733 »

this article hits so close to home with my experience teaching this semester I feel personally attacked. It makes me sad. I'm really enjoying reading the discussion others are having so I will contribute to anecdotes that I think are telling of just what the author is getting at.

1) About a year ago I was teaching a class that included working with a user group from a country in Africa. 2/3rd of the way through the semester, after submitting an extensive (and well done) research paper on the country's culture, norms, people, and public health needs a student asked me flat out "Is Chad a real country or did you invent it for this project". School is so internalized as a game that they don't even know that they are approaching school as a game.

2) I recently gave a test and received a number of regrade requests. One student had written two paragraphs to answer a question needing one sentence. His regrade request (after seeing the key) was to include the first five words of the first sentence, and ellipses, and the last four words of his last sentence and ask for credit "because the answer was in there". Another asked for a partial credit because 'I understood it even if my answer wasn't right'

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#423

Post by avs733 »

beebmam wrote: post #13
leetrout wrote: post #2

This is TERRIFYINGLY accurate. """ Here’s what will happen: Like most other humans, your students will be lazy and fallible. So many of them will procrastinate and not do the homework. So they won’t learn anything. So they will get a terrible grade on the final. And then they will blame you for not forcing them to do the homework """ This is almost exactly how adjunct teaching went for me. It was not the experience I…

Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard

they are perfectly willing to work hard...the problem is their heuristics of what it means to work hard have been poorly developed.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#424

Post by smichel17 »

Someone I know went to a college where the final exam was 100% of the grade, in most courses. You could retake it as many times as you want, but only if you scored below 70% (presumably to limit the amount of retakes). The result was that if people weren't feeling confident on the test day, they would recycle their test (not hand it in), thereby receiving a zero and guaranteeing the ability to retake.

Designing systems of incentives is hard.

That said, several of the mentioned problems seem like they have solutioms.

- Excessive detail: keep both or several sets of instructions. The detailed version is authoritative in the case of a dispute by the student, but as long as they don't dispute, it's fine if they follow the spirit of the instructions.

- Deadlines: Give X "extension tokens" per semester, which allow students to submit one day late, no questions asked. Max 2 tokens per assignment (48h extension). My undergrad CS department did this and it was great.

I would guess the latter would work well for regrades as well. A generous but bounded number of regrade tokens. You could even do something like make unused tokens worth 1 bonus % on the final exam, if you want to further disincentive abuse.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#425

Post by tempestn »

jhanschoo wrote: post #127
warner25 wrote: post #10

I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now…

On the other hand, this observation must be qualified as not necessarily generalizable to all teenagers and parents. Sometimes a person may grow up and realize that their parents were indeed quite lacking, and be right in that assessment. I think this other circumstance is important to at least mention because children of objectively lacking parents can have doubts in their mind about their own judgment. In part beca…

And unfortunately sometimes people grow up with parents who are quite lacking, then themselves fall into the same patterns, and think, "Oh, now I get it," while taking away exactly the wrong lesson. I know people who grew up in an abusive household, then eventually went on to have kids, and different siblings from that same family ended up going in completely different directions, from carrying on many of their parents' hated behaviours on one side, to being excessively permissive on the other. (And one ended up being a great parent, having put serious thought into their childhood and what they wanted to do differently.)

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#426

Post by ekanes »

fungiblecog wrote: post #300
warner25 wrote: post #10

I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now…

Maybe I'm weird. I've brought up my kids without applying the dumb rules i hated as a kid and they're both happy and well adjusted. And i'm happier too because i've avoided all the usual stupid family arguments that would otherwise result. I see other parents repeatedly inflicting on their kids rules and behaviours that are completely unnecessary but they think it's "the right thing" i see this as truly stupid and a…

(Approx) How old are your kids?

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#427

Post by Aeolun »

smichel17 wrote: post #424

Someone I know went to a college where the final exam was 100% of the grade, in most courses. You could retake it as many times as you want, but only if you scored below 70% (presumably to limit the amount of retakes). The result was that if people weren't feeling confident on the test day, they would recycle their test (not hand it in), thereby receiving a zero and guaranteeing the ability to retake. Designing syste…

> The detailed version is authoritative in the case of a dispute

I think this means everyone will always refer the detailed version. Especially if this is stated up front. Nobody wants to be fucked if the _do_ legitimately need to dispute.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#428

Post by bo1024 »

nojs wrote: post #366

One of the most effective exam techniques I have seen, which is uncommon in my country but maybe common elsewhere, is oral exams. I TA’d for a German professor who did them for his stat/ML course, and so got to sit in on all of them (I also took the course myself in an earlier year so had the experience as a student as well). The process was: 1. Give students a list of about 100 questions in advance, more than you co…

Oral exams sound fantastic. Unfortunately they don’t scale. Sounds difficult for a class of 30 let alone 300.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#429

Post by matheusmoreira »

tempestn wrote: post #421

This passage is terrible and beautiful: Here’s a story from my father. He was teaching a course for working professionals that had a large project component. He—being naive and idealistic—decided that as long as the students eventually finished the project, they had learned the material, so they should get full credit. Thus, his policy was that students could submit the project, get it graded, and then repeat this pr…

It's funny, because this evolutionary algorithm is actually just peer review. Submit some work, it gets sent back with comments and corrections, authors change their work to reflect feedback and repeat until the result is published. This is what happens when people try to publish a paper in a journal, when people try to get their pull request accepted. Maybe these students didn't learn the material but I'm sure they learned this process.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#430

Post by borroka »

rayiner wrote: post #309
turkishmonky wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those types of generalization have always been troublesome for me - While I admit I was an idiot as a kid, the respect I had for my parents has decreased even further the older I get. I understand more and more how harmful their behaviors were for me as a child, and have been intentional about not falling into the same behaviors with my kids. Some parents are just really really inadequate or abusive as parents.

But there’s a reason for the generalization. Some parents are inadequate and abusive, but virtually every kid is an impulsive and short-sighted creature whose brain isn’t fully developed until their mid 20s.

It's a matter of probability like everything in life. A good parent can lead to good outcomes, say, 60% of the time. A bad parent, 20% of the time. The numbers are random, but that's the idea. In retrospect, the vast majority of parents I knew when I was a kid were "bad," not in the sense of abusive, but in the sense of having no idea. They didn't have any clue about their own lives, how many could they have about their children?

They didn't even want to inquire and then decide what was best for their children. Too many parents are given a pass because some sort of "sacred virtue" is assigned to parenting and any mistake that does not include beating their children is somehow forgiven or given a pass.

The "they did the best they could" is a cop-out: did they do the best they could given their laziness, poor impulse control, vision that doesn't go beyond the fence of their backyard?

For example, I was an excellent student, the best in the school, in terms of awards and recognition. Not Einstein, mind you, but someone they should have identified as very talented from a scholastic/intellectual standpoint. My parents never saw this in me, for some reason, because now, I would immediately identify as very talented someone who did as well as I did. My parents never hit me or told me I was stupid or anything like that. They simply acknowledged that I was a good student and that was it. If they had said, this woman is talented, we need to support her, find her mentors, send her to the best universities, I have little doubt that I would have been very successful.

I was successful anyway, after traveling a winding and long road, but my path to professional and financial success could have been (these are my a priori odds) much easier and faster.

Now, you might say, if they had acted differently, maybe you wouldn't be here, etc., which is a very defeatist way of thinking. Their process was wrong and for no other reason than their "intellectual laziness".

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